The Trial of Elly Kedward
by Jacob Kingston
Summary: In 1785, Elly Kedward — a Catholic woman living in the town of Blair — was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to banishment, which was akin to a death sentence in those days. Her story is the beginning of the long and bloody history of the Black Hills Forest... or is it?


_Blair Township  
Province of Maryland  
7 January 1785_

She was imprisoned again. The colonial courthouse wasn't as extravagant as the one in Wexford. Wexford, in Ireland, where she had been imprisoned the second time. Where she had fled sixteen years ago and made the long, treacherous journey across the ocean in hope of finding freedom in the New World. But, as she was quickly beginning to learn, freedom did not exist. Not in England nor Ireland, and certainly not in the Township of Blair.

She could feel their gazes upon her, the spectators — Protestants who had no tolerance for a Catholic — and felt the wrath of their judgement. Thrice had she escaped death despite overwhelming odds and horrific circumstances; but, somehow, Elly Kedward knew that, this time, her luck had run out. They, her accusers, would not let her leave this place alive.

Her judges (for that is what they called themselves) were seated before her, dressed in mostly black. Men, because women had no position of power when it came to matters of the church, and yet, despite their Christian leanings, there was hatred in their eyes for her. "Witch," the had called her. And for what? They said it had been the words of children, seven of them, what convicted her. But she had not done it! She had harmed no children, not a hair! Yet still, the centermost judge looked down upon her, and with disgust in his voice said, "How sadly hath the Lord testified against you." — a pause — "Elly Kedward, you are to be banished from this Township's liberties into the woods for your crime of witchcraft. Hast thou anything to say for thyself?"

It was futile, she knew, to say anything. This court of Protestants would never hear her out. She was a dead woman. "No," she said. "None."

* * *

The villagers gathered in the square to watch the accused witch as she was taken out to her punishment. It had been decided by the townspeople — and conveyed through the judges — that she was to be taken out into the woods and tied to a tree. There, her fate would reside in the hands of the elements or, if she was unfortunate enough, the wolves. But Elly did not fear the elements or the wolves. She feared the woods themselves.

Perhaps it was intuition — perhaps it was something else entirely — but Elly had always had a bad feeling when it came to the woods surrounding Blair. There were rumors, of course. She had overheard the Indian merchants who came to the village to trade numerous times. Their traders always warned the Blair merchants not to venture out into the woods and especially not at night, but that was all she could understand with her limited knowledge of their language. _Okee, Okee,_ they kept repeating that word over and over again but she knew not what it meant.

The people of Blair lined the street as she — bound so tightly that her skin felt on fire due to the rub of the rope — was led out of Blair Township for the last time on a wooden wagon. They carried her as far from the village as they could: passed the creek which bordered it and into the thick of the trees. When they could no longer hear the murmuring of the villagers nor the babbling of the creek, her captors came to a stop.

They selected a tree, the tallest in the clearing where they had stopped, and took her to it. She offered them no resistance. Even if she could somehow overpower them (and she knew that she could not), what was she to do then? Return? The villagers would surely kill her themselves if she returned to Blair without her company. Moreover, she was tired. She had lived fifty-six long years, during which time she had seen all of the cruelty and brutality that mankind had to offer. Her faith, though it remained, was dangerously thin; Christ had never saved her from the many injustices that had been wrought upon her throughout her lifetime. She was ready for it to all be over. She was ready to finally let go and stop all of the fighting. The men tied her to the tree easily.

They tied her up aways, where her feet would not touch the ground. She was horrified (but not surprised) when the men went out into the woods — leaving their wagon — and returned with many large stones, which they tied to her hands and feet. It was pain beyond pain: a slow build; first she was uncomfortable, then a dull ache arose in her arms and legs, and soon the ache had grown into a throb, which turned into a white hot pain. It felt as though her arms and legs might be ripped from their sockets; but the men did not care. They loaded up their wagons and, without a word, were gone.

They would never see Elly Kedward again.

* * *

She didn't get scared until the vanishing of the sun painted the sky a deep black and the noises of the forest began to rise through the night.

At first, she could easily ignore the sounds of animals busying themselves in the brush. The pain in her limbs was so great that she couldn't think much less hear anything substantial. But as the night waxed on, the pain in her arms began to vanish: replaced by numbness. She felt nothing; and, since she felt nothing, she was now keenly aware of the sounds coming from the trees around her. Sounds that she should not be hearing way out here, so far away from Blair. Sounds that did not belong to animals or men: they belonged to _children_.

She scrunched up her nose at the absurdity of it all.

Children? Here? And they were _laughing!_

Elly immediately began to entertain the idea that she might being going mad. If anyone deserved to go mad, it was her. She had nearly been driven mad in Waterford, where she was imprisoned for nearly twelve years and was nothing more than a plaything for the men who shared her cell. She had come closer still alone in the hills and woods of Skibbereen, where she mourned the loss of seven pregnancies and her father — how brutally he had been murdered. By the time she was a prisoner in Wexford, she was on the brink of insanity. And it had been _sixteen years_ since then! If anyone should be hallucinating children's laughter, it should be her! But she knew she wasn't hallucinating.

She was still very much alert, and the sounds she was hearing were real. They were growing louder and louder, and then — she would have jumped were her limbs not weighted down, her body not tied to the trunk of a great tree — the forest came alive around her. Loud _bangs_ came from deep within the woods and it sounded as though the very trees were uprooting themselves and moving elsewhere, though she knew that to be absurd. The sounds were growing now. They were no longer the sounds of children laughing. They were horrific whoops and hollers — the sound of Hell itself opening up around her.

She closed her eyes. The Indians had been right all along, and she still had a long ways to go. It was only the first night.

* * *

It was torture to die this way.

On the second day (or, rather, night, because the sun was vanishing below the treetops again), every part of her body ached. She was without food and water, the cold was biting at her bare feet, and she was beginning to wonder how much longer it would be before she could not take it any longer. What would give first? Would she die first of starvation? Dehydration? Exposure? Perhaps the forest's animals could smell an old woman nearing death and they would be the ones to come and finish her off.

But as the moon appeared high in the sky and the cold of winter set into the woods around her, the forest slowly came alive yet again. She was nearly delirious when she first heard the children whispering in the trees. Her mind was beginning to play tricks on her, because she almost thought she could _see_ them: their ghostly shadows were pacing along the edge of the clearing and they were laughing at her. She wanted to scream! To tell them to go away! She had never harmed any children, and yet they laughed as she died! They celebrated her death! She faded away into unconsciousness.

— but it was not to last...

She awoke. She did not know how long had passed. Had it been minutes? Hours? Days? The night was still cold, but it was also quiet. There was not the voices of children to haunt her, and she could not see the shapes she had previously noticed along the edges of the trees. What she saw instead was much more horrifying.

Sticks.

Bundles of sticks.

They were hanging around the clearing and they had not been there before. Each was held together by twine and took the shape of a stick-person. At once she felt horribly afraid. Was this more childish foolishness? No. Children could not do this. There were dozens of them! She felt the hair stand up along her arms, which had gone numb the day before, and a memory bubbled forth — a memory she had consulted the day before, but now seemed relevant. _Okee... Okee..._

Something was coming. She could hear it crashing about the brush. It was snapping limbs, breaking fallen logs, and smashing earth beneath its massive footfalls. If she closed her eyes, she could hear its heavy breathing, which was heavy and labored like a horse that had just come a long way. She opened her eyes.

Amongst the trees, far enough to be overlooked, but close enough for Elly to feel fear spike in her chest, stood a figure. It was dark: darker than the shadows around it, darker than the night sky above. She could see its outline, so she knew it was large and she knew it was watching her. Whatever it was — a figment of her imagination, a demon, one of the children figures from before — she was instantly certain that it is what the Indians had warned the people of Blair about. The evil that was hidden amongst the trees.

The night grew colder and the wind began to howl. But, unlike any wind she had ever heard before, it howled in a human voice. A familiar voice: the voice of a man she had once known well, but which she knew was long dead.

 _"Eilis..._ "

She had not heard that name in sixteen years. She had forsaken it for an Anglicized name — Elisabeth, or Elly — before she had made the six month voyage across the ocean to the New World.

"Papa?" she spoke the words as they she were still the ten-year-old girl that she was when she had lost him.

Suddenly, there was a great rush of cold wind. She shut her eyes from the intensity of it, and when she opened them again she was both astonished and frightened to find herself on the floor of the clearing; her bindings and the stones that had held down her arms and legs were strewn about the clearing as though they had been hurled there by something with immense strength. The shadow figure was gone from the trees, but the wind was still howling and it was still howling with the voice of her father.

 _"Eilis,"_ said the voice. _"Come."_

The disembodied voice came from behind her. She could feel the breath of the one who uttered the words on her neck; it was a cold breath, colder than the wind around her. The cold breath of death. And, yet, she felt compelled to obey. How long had she yearned to hear her father's voice again? How long had she cursed God for taking him from her in such a gruesome manner and at such a young age? But there was still a small voice, at the very back of her mind, telling her not to look behind her — not to obey —

 _"Eilis,"_ her father's voice said again. _"Come to Papa."_

There was no doubt that the words were her father's. Even after all she had been through — even when she had thought that she would never hear them spoken to her like this ever again — she remembered. He had spoken this way to her so many times as a girl. Soothing. She imagined it would have been like a whisper in the wind, and, suddenly, rationality didn't matter anymore.

It didn't matter that her father had been dead forty-six years and that he had died thousands of miles away on Irish soil. It didn't matter that the little voice in the back of her head was screaming at her to stay facing forward — to not look behind her. She was old and tired and longed to be the little girl her father had rocked to sleep at night one last time. With tears glistening in her eyes, she turned.

The wind howled through an empty clearing.

* * *

The sun was just peeking over the trees a week after Elly Kedward's trial.

The people of Blair were restless to know the fate of the woman they had sentenced to death. While she lived, their children were not safe from her black magic. So it was decided that a scouting party should be sent out into the woods to confirm the woman's fate. Nobody thought she would be alive when they found her; it had been a week and the nights had been bitter cold. She would have died of exposure by now if the animals hadn't eaten her. But the townspeople were concerned about her magic: would it sustain her?

Five men, the bravest and noblest that could be found in the township, set out just before midday towards the clearing where the woman had been left. Freshly fallen snow made the trek longer than usual and they were forced to carefully navigate a fallen tree to get over the creek, whose water they were certain would be colder than ice. From there, the woman's resting place was just a few minutes walk even in the snow. When they arrived in the clearing, sunlight was glistening off the snow piled along the ground.

The ropes that had bound her to the tree were sticking out of a heap of snow at the base of the same tree. The rocks that had held her arms and legs were spread across the clearing, as if they had been thrown there by something with massive strength. But the body of Elly Kedward was nowhere to be seen. There were not blood trails in the snow, nor were there footprints to indicate that any animals had been in the area. The clearing was, for all intents and purposes, pristine — untouched.

"What do ye suppose happened to her?" a man asked, his voice quivering more with fear than with the cold.

The other men didn't respond.

They returned to Blair Township and told the people there that the woman was gone. They lied when they said that she must have been eaten by wolves or other animals known to prowl the woods. The people slept in peace.

But one year later, in the Fall of 1786, Blair Township was struck by a rash of vanishings. One-by-one, the children — all of whom had accused Elly Kedward of wrongdoing — disappeared from their homes and were never heard from again. And when it was clear that they would never return home, graves were erected in the town cemetery in honor of their deaths. Yet the vanishings did not stop there. Next were the families of Elly's accusers and then other villagers too began to vanish, seemingly into thin air. The people of Blair Township, consumed by panic for what they saw as an act of the Devil going on all around them, vowed never to speak the name "Elly Kedward" again, but that didn't stop the vanishings, and so the village was abandoned.

Far and wide, throughout the Province of Maryland, the escapees from Blair spread out and were afraid to speak of the place they had come from, though some obviously did so reluctantly. One of the men who had been sent to check Elly Kedward's clearing — the clearing where they had left her all alone to die in the cold — managed to relate his story to a woman in a far away town. In a letter to her husband, the woman wrote of his story:

 _"As he related to me, he lived in a town forty miles to the north. The place had been abandoned, he told me, as it had come under a curse. The well-built homes that still stood there were boarded up and empty, with no signs as to why their denizens had chosen to leave so abruptly."_

Throughout the countryside, the story of this ghost town spread, and soon nobody in their right mind would have gone looking for it. They place, they thought, sounded like a gateway to Hell. The stories that were told spoke of an abandoned town which had tried an old woman for crimes against the Cross and banished her to her death in the nearby woods. It was thought that she died in those woods, for her remains were never found in the spot where they left her. They wrongly assumed her to be gone and their ordeal to be over. Then the following year, it was said, the town fell under a curse.

The terrible curse of a witch.


End file.
